[ljm]

Even that makes little sense. Reddit has survived on volunteer moderation and their use of third party tools to manage the workload. If Reddit doesn’t want to cover the cost of that infrastructure then they’re going to incur the extra cost of hiring moderators.

I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing scheme they’re happy to sacrifice whatever they can for it.

[curun1r]

> I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API

Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads.

Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way.

All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.

[babypuncher]

This would have been plenty fair in my opinion, and may have even gotten me to buy Reddit premium.

Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.

[ljm]

I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet.

Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.

[babypuncher]

They will probably go the Twitter route and decide moderation isn't all that important.

This of course means unsavory content like hate speech, blatant astroturfing, and conspiracy theories will flourish, scaring away big ad spenders. They will try to compensate for this by allowing more ads for online gambling and male enhancement pills.